Marsattracts!

Our final project for MakerSquare: an app for booking flights to Mars. Whimsical? Absolutely. Ahead of its time? Slightly. Completely ridiculous? Only if you’ve forgotten how to dream. [goto](http://marsattracts.com)

The red, green and blue colors derive from stages of Mars’ transformation from barrenness to life depicted in the epic “Red Mars,” “Green Mars,” “Blue Mars” trilogy written by Kim Stanley Robinson. Red, green and blue are also the primary components of the spectrum, symbolizing unity in diversity, as well as light itself, and thus reason and enlightenment. The tricolor form also traditionally represents the republican values of liberty, equality and justice. The flag was sewn by Maggie Zubrin and brought aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery at the invitation of astronaut John Mace Grunsfeld. ...

Day 35 of MakerSquare. Morning: lesson on node.js and gelato. We got a quick and dirty introduction to node, its asynchronicity, and the Express.js framework. In the span of the class, we Installed node.js and npm, the Node package manager Registered API keys with Facebook and Twitter Ran our first node.js server Ate homemade gelato - cookie dough flavor! Poked around the Jade page renderer Ran a node.js server to collect our Twitter stream Posted through the server to Facebook when “JavaScript” was mentioned in said Twitter stream Played Bomberman, as built with node.js Built a chat server Whew. ...

Day 33 of MakerSquare. Morning lesson was on algorithms and using Big O notation to note how long they should take to run. The basis for the lesson came from a co-founder’s conversation with a Google recruiter and her suggestions for what we should know for technical interviews. I enjoyed the lesson because ti was stretching a different, but parallel, part of the brain. Afternoon was project work. We worked on figuring out where our hackathon project had holes and how to patch them. I added dropdown menus that populate from the database. It works for now, but it looks like we’ll be restructuring our models & it probably won’t work tomorrow. Probably means it’s time to start writing tests. ...

Day 32 of MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day. Shout out to everyone else who wore a tie, especially the ladies who rocked them with dresses and blouses. Keeping it classy. Front-end: Adding ZURB Foundation to a Rails app and using Sass to write markup. In the evening, I found a blog post detailing how to incorporate custom fonts in Rails, which I’ll link later. Once again, going through Foundation, I admire the speed and ease with which I can get something looking decent, especially next to what I made before I started at MakerSquare. Not that the older stuff was bad, but writing code by hand takes a lot longer. ...